Sunday Morning Game Ocarina of Time Part 25

And the first thing we see: Our goal! The pillar we need to push down (for some reason), but with no way of actually pushing it down, yet.

So instead, let's explore this monster of a room. And turns out, it's got quite a few tricks up its sleeve. First off, there are these invisible fire walls that appear when you get close to them (fun!) so I have to walk slowly everywhere and then there are these:

Just an ordinary door!
...I thought.

But no, Instead of opening like a door, it smacks down in your face, revealing nothing behind it. So it's a mimic door. Better and better.
And there are fire bats everywhere, naturally. And boulders!
It's a great room, worthy of being in a Temple, for sure.

So I scoot around it all and eventually get to a proper door that's locked and everything.

Inside it is another tipster, and guess what? He's got a bonus tip before I even rescue him!

How kind! Double the tip for half the pay. But i can't rescue him proper yet, so we'll have to wait and see what the final tip is.

Back out the hallway, I get to access another part of the invisible-fire-maze-with-bats-and-boulders and find a switch that disables a large firewall on a timer. So I press the switch and run up and get to the other side just before the firewall and there's a door.

And just look at that door.
It's so much not a door.

It's a mimic. Again. And I'm behind a firewall, with no other way back.

Did this game just troll me?

If so, well done, I guess. But I'm actually stuck. Like, proper stuck.

Sooooo, I do some "experimenting" (googling) until I learn that you can bomb those fake doors and that'll here reveal an actual door.
And I'm like... I looked behind the door. There was nothing. That's just annoying. At least give me a clue that there's an opening behind the fake door? It's not like the other fake doors had actual doors behind them.

And inside is a mini-boss room with a "Flare Dancer"

Which is a sweet little thing that dances and skates around and spits fire everywhere and I can't hurt it at all until I learn that you can pull out the heart with a hookshot, and inside, it's just this cute lil' thing:

It's the black blob in the bottom.

And you can whack that a bunch before it jumps back into its flame suit and eventually the flame turns blue, then green (?) before it explodes.

That leads to an elevator and a quick switch-timing puzzle before I get to the meat of the potato (what?):

Up at the top is a big chest and at the bottom of the spiral is a switch, that turns off the flames on a timer. And there are two ways up there, a slow, outside one that requires a lot of climbing, and a fast, precarious one on a tiny ledge next to a pit.

I try the slow one first, just for good measure.

But of course it's the fast one, you have to do.

You might say it's an explosive find.

..

It's not that explosive. I hit a platform with it and it just gently got knocked down rather than smashing it to bits. I'm a bit disappointed.

And in the next room I hit a strong button that knocks an entire staircase into place, which is alright (and the camera does this cool move where it smashes in timing to the steps getting knocked in, which was fun. And you can't see that because this is text.)

And eventually, after all this meandering, we circle back to the big invisible-flame room but this time, I'm upstairs (again, neat), and there's a rusted switch.

But rust ain't nothing a good whack with a hammer can't solve (count those negatives), so I smash all the rusted switches and rescue a tipster!

And now, with the power of the hammer and being on top of things, I can whack that pillar from the beginning with aplomb and send it flying down.
And with me needing to go back, I can either do it the slow way, through all the rooms I took to get here... Orr.......

Oh. it was fine. Link took no damage. I feel like this game is inconsistent with fall damage. I swear I remember taking fall damage sometimes. But only sometimes.
(Also, the reason the pillar should've been knocked down? It's a platform I can use to reach the Boss Room. That I couldn't reach before. So that guy who told me to do it just knew that it would become a platform. It wasn't even like it was a switch or puzzle or anything. Huh.)

Oh well, back to the entrance. To whack more things.

Behind that is another flying tile room and another Flame Dancer but, turns out the Hammer makes that fight trivial since a whack on the ground knocks the heart out, so I don't even have to aim.

And, finally, the Final Tip:

Help your siblings, kids. They're family.
(At least I hope it's the Final Tip because I ain't rescuing more of these boys.)

You get a Boss Key for doing it. (Which, hey, just remembered Boss Key is something different and now I'm going to think of it like that for the rest of the game.)

Which leaves me ready for the Boss!

Hope you're ready for it! Because I'm not! Hopefully, I'll be next time, as that's when we're doing it.

It'll be a blast. Big Bro will be there and we'll fight a dragon together. What could possibly go wrong?